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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Edmund Wilson say is the purpose of the social science?

2. What is the problem with sociology, in Edmund Wilson's estimation?

3. What statistic shows the strength of the transcendental view, in Edmund Wilson's account?

4. What does Wilson offer as evidence of cross-cultural epi-genetic rules?

5. What role does Wilson ascribe to human nature?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Wilson describe the universality of art?

2. What is the purpose of the social sciences, and how does Wilson distinguish the social sciences from the physical social sciences?

3. What ethical perspective does Wilson call the empiricist view?

4. What is the sign, in EO Wilson's account, that culture is evolving?

5. What ethical perspective does Wilson call the Transcendental view?

6. What social science does Wilson credit with coming closest to consilience?

7. What threats to contemporary culture does Wilson describe, and how is consilience useful in answering them?

8. How does art look through the gene-culture evolution paradigm Wilson offers?

9. In what way are epi-genetic rules cross-cultural?

10. What is the difference between nurturists and hereditarians in describing how culture evolves?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Is consilience possible, and if so, who would practice it? Is it necessarily communal? In our modern circumstance of specialized research and analysis, can one person--can one panel of people contain and unify all knowledge? Is Wilson arguing for the unification of knowledge, or just better networks and communication between disciplines?

Essay Topic 2

What kinds of situations or uses would consilience be best for, and what kinds of knowledge or what situations would not benefit by a 'consilient' perspective? What are the limitations of Wilson's consilience? What are the strengths?

Essay Topic 3

Part of Wilson's argument about the value of science is the technology that science has required for its own purposes, or produced for consumers, but applied science seems to be different than the pure science Wilson is talking about throughout 'Consilience', especially when the perpetual drive to innovate in business has required the policy of planned obsolescence, where everything technological is designed to be superseded by new products in the future. Does this present a problem for consilience, or is this beyond the scope of Wilson's argument? How do science's industrial uses, which seem to tend toward dispersion, relate with the possibility of science's unification?

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